Processes & Operations

Store Operations Excellence: Why All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Online stores continue to gain market shares, making it crucial for brick and mortar stores to defend their piece of the cake. An exceptional customer experience and store operations excellence are two promising strategies to keep customers coming despite more convenient channels.

This article is about the operational excellence of brick and mortar stores in times of digitalisation, and why technological innovation will not suffice when it comes to providing an outstanding customer experience. (more…)

The Art of Creating Successful Store Concepts: Manage the Complexity Trap

Amazon closes down all physical book stores, pop-ups and 4-star stores in the UK and US. Do you want to learn how to avoid their mistakes?

Despite the initial media hype and large investments in technology, the stores failed to deliver the expected returns. And while that does come as a surprise, we questioned whether packing stores with digital gimmicks will make up for missing the essentials of retailing right after their opening.

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Brand Retail Best Practices – Six Areas to Work on this Year

We had two rollercoaster years for the brand lifestyle industry around the globe. Reading the interim financial reports suggests that the majority of top brands have grown, despite pandemic and the global supply chain crisis.

And brand retail continuous to be an essential part of the past and future growth.

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How to get Quality into your Brand Strategy and Planning

Key learnings of 30 years brand strategy and planning. Tips how to improve your brand growth planning, today.

Regularly media reports that companies take a zero-based budget (ZBB) approach, and cite respective studies. In light of Covid19 pandemic, many brands applied cost-cutting exercises to adjust their strategy and planning.

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Rethinking store processes & merchandise management

A healthy store P & L is still at the heart of happy retailing. As Covid-19 made it somewhat easy to lower rent costs, many took the same approach with store head count. But this will certainly cost future retail productivity and flexibility.

So how do you adjust store operations in Post Covid Retail without losing more sales and compromising customer service?

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Retail Operations 2020: Time to Manage Outside of the Box

Barely 20 years ago all retail operations took place in high street store formats. Then cross channel happened, and now Covid-19, and efficient retail operations are utterly transformed.

In the early years of this century, brand retail operation felt like paradise. Store networks were growing globally and being an expanding head of retail was a fun job. Managing high street stores, factory outlets, concession stores and flagships, having CEOs promote direct to consumer growth, and even the CFO was happy. All that was needed for retail operation was easily organised and within the store ‘boxes’. But soon brand stores encountered mighty antagonists.

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Best Practice in Retail & Online in the 2020ies

The Covid-19 pandemic is devastating for those with pre-existing conditions. But it also mobilises the best in all others: unforeseen creativity, outstanding personal engagement, true loyalty and support among many more qualities.

There is no way around acknowledging that the situation is grim wherever you look and listen across the brand and retail industry, in parts even online. But if we pay close attention, we can also observe new brand industry best practice emerging.

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Good Workmanship & Best Practice Management Are Key to Growth

The speed of global brand growth has been slowing down. While fast-movers pay a high price for restructuring, successful brands continue to grow with brand best practice management.

Whether Tommy Hilfiger wins over Zalando buyers with a digital showroom, Rapha thrives thanks to their tight-knit membership community, or Lululemon enters new markets on grassroots values – brand best practice management enables brands to outgrow competitors. (more…)

Special Edition: Processes & Operations for Retail Managers

While everyone talks about  growing online sales, offline retail still makes up the vast majority of consumption. This special edition offers inspiration and guidance on processes & operations for retail managers in this context.

E-commerce managers and financial investors can be quick in labelling your stores as part of the so-called ‘old economy’. But today, retail still stands for 85% of all consumption and offers many opportunities to create superior consumer experiences and be commercially successful. As many brands and retailers have shown, a great brick and mortar store can grow far more profitable that online sales.

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Global Retail Best Practice – 100 Ideas from around the world

The likes of Amazon and Alibaba opened tech-heavy brick & mortar stores, but best practice commercial brand retail still lives elsewhere.

Sales reports of industry show that recent years were good for large parts of the lifestyle brand industry. Almost 4/5 of the top 100 European and US American lifestyle brands had a growth year, and for the most part did better than the year before. This was despite a global department store fallout and online growth and was largely based e.com and store growth.

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Engaging Associates: Best Practice Retail Operations at Polo Ralph Lauren

Your KPIs, dashboard and performance management are in place, but your retail operations are missing that final touch? This best practice story shows how new technologies can help you win at associate engagement too.

Put yourself in the shoes of a senior vice president of outlet retail for a lifestyle brand in Europe who runs a few stores across several countries. Your stores are commercially successful, and your brand is an anchor tenant for many landlords. But you observe that you could do even better by becoming more engaged in retail operations. Are you tempted to push that old KPI and performance management button to reach your full- and part-time store associates? And, how well has that worked out for you in the past?

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That One Perfect Day: How UGG Solves the Ice Cream Problem

Thanksgiving in the US, Ramadan in the Middle East, Christmas, or simply next Saturday: high traffic days are the days were profits are made from store operations.

Brand store operations is theoretically not a complicated job. For a sales clerk in lifestyle retail it comprises three core processes: 1. receiving and displaying merchandise, 2. servicing customers and 3. removing outdated goods to make room for the new season.

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Have We Forgotten the Customer? The Necessary Fashion Retail Revolution

Fashion retail is an industry in trouble. Mass consumption is declining, female customers are not having expectations met. We need a revolution.

This is true for many companies in the fashion industry. Mass consumption is receding and it’s not only Wöhrl, Gerry Weber and Tom Tailor finding themselves in the entrepreneur’s trap. A good example of this are beacons – an application to send digital coupons or invites to customers passing by. It turned out, that this app is basically unknown to customers. Another is virtual shop windows.

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International Expansion: Product Adaptation Without Jeopardising SKU Productivity

This post will answer the question “how much product adaptation is needed and healthy for a brand starting its international expansion?”

In answering the question, I am going to use examples from fashion and lifestyle companies, as I’ve spent the majority of my professional life in those industries.

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The Digital Age needs Digital Leadership

If you look into the digital market, you will notice that there are no German or even European big players in the digital commerce business.

Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg and the Google boys are leading the western hemisphere while clever and aggressive Asian entrepreneurs like Jack Ma or Robin Li are leading the Eastern world. So why is there no German Jobs? A Dutch Bezos? A French Ma? (more…)